Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1034 - Sebastian Junger
Uploaded: 2017-11-07T00:15:41.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1034 - Sebastian Junger' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-11-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1034 - Sebastian Junger' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-11-07. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1034 - Sebastian Junger

Four, three, two.
Welcome back, man.
Hey, thank you. Good to be here.
Great to see you again.
Yeah, I like your new spot.
Thank you. Thank you very much, man.
You have a real flip phone.
I do have a real flip phone.
And you said that you didn't go back to it.
You never left.
I never left her.
So you never went like iPhone, Android, never?
No. No, I never even thought about it.
Never even thought about it?
No.
You see people taking pictures and using apps?
Nothing?
Nothing.
I don't need the apps.
I'm good.
There's no draw at all?
Using the internet?
Answering email?
I have a laptop at home, and I do access the internet, yes.
But when you're out, you don't want to mess with it?
No.
When I'm out, I want to be out.
I'm in the world, you know?
Right.
If you're looking at your phone, you're not in the world,
and so you don't get either.
You don't get either thing.
You get along very well with my friend Ari.
He went back to a flip phone, and he looks disdainfully,
sort of like former alcoholics look at everybody with a drink,
like there's no way you could just enjoy one drink, you loser.
Right.
You know that?
Right.
Yeah, no, I just look around at this.
I mean, I'm an anthropologist, and I'm interested in human behavior,
and I look at the behavior, like literally the physical behavior of people with
smartphones,
and it doesn't, it looks antisocial and unhappy and anxious,
and I don't want to be, I don't want to look like that,
and I don't want to feel like I think those people feel.
Wow, that's deep.
I'm a junkie.
You know, it's really interesting because I was at a restaurant the other day,
and I was looking around, and literally everyone in the restaurant was looking
at their phone.
No one was talking to anybody, and I was thinking, what if there was a drug
that did that?
What if there was a drug that didn't kill you, but it just sucked up all your
time,
and you just stared blankly at your hand and did everything that you do while
you're using a phone?
People would be terrified, like you're staring at your hand and crashing into
cars,
you're staring at your hand and walking in the poles.
Yeah, I mean, there is a drug.
It's that, social media.
I mean, I think the big lie of our generation is the phrase social media.
It really isn't.
It's antisocial media, and it has a lot of uses and, you know, whatever,
but it's not social in any human sense,
and if you look at suicide rates, depression rates, PTSD rates, anxiety rates,
they're doing nothing but going up in our society.
Mass shootings, you know, just something tragic just happened yesterday.
All those things, they're indicators of something,
and they're all going up in our society despite the fact that we're a very
wealthy,
powerful, relatively peaceful society, like something's going on.
I can't prove that it's, you know, the Internet or social media or whatever.
I mean, obviously, but the fact that those things are happening at the same
time
does make me wonder that these new devices certainly don't bring happiness
because the numbers are going in the wrong direction.
Well, I don't think they're designed to bring happiness,
but they're certainly designed to give you access to information,
perhaps maybe with some discipline that can be used in some sort of a way that
benefits us.
Well, yeah, I mean, all that information is available on your laptop at your
desk at home.
I mean, I think the problem is when people want to be socially connected
constantly,
no matter what they're doing.
And that, I think, keeps people from actually fully experiencing whatever they're
actually doing.
I think there's definitely some truth to that,
but I do like the fact that I can ask my phone questions.
Like if I don't know anything, I can ask.
There's a new feature on this Google Pixel where you squeeze the side of it
and the Google Assistant comes up and you can ask it questions.
You squeeze it and ask a question.
I mean, that's some space-age shit, man.
Yeah, or it's downright creepy.
I mean, you know, that's how you look at it.
I mean, you know, I get it.
Like, I mean, you have all of human knowledge in your front pocket.
Yeah.
Accessible at every moment.
Like, I do understand the power of it and the appeal of it.
I'm not saying there aren't great things about it.
Of course there are.
It's just, for me, the downside outweighs the upside.
For other people, I guess it doesn't.
But if you look, again, if you look at mental health statistics in this country,
we're doing something wrong because they're all going in the wrong direction.
I agree with you.
I just wonder if the mental health statistics are indicative of other issues.
You know, I think lifestyle, what you do with your time during the day.
A lot of people live, like, very deeply unsatisfying lives.
And I don't know if the phone accentuates that problem.
I mean, we were talking the other day about we were at the airport.
We were waiting to fly home, and there was some girl, and she was talking.
We were just eavesdropping.
And she was talking about, like, the amazing race and how she, you know,
oh, this show's so boring now, and I can't wait to, and I'm going to eat this,
and then I'm going to eat that, and I'm supposed to get a raise at work.
It's, like, all nonsense, non-engaging, not interesting.
There's no real life to anything she's talking about.
I'm like, this is most of our country or a large part of our country.
Absolutely.
I mean, the thing about social media is that it sort of weaponizes blandness.
I mean, it allows, it gives people a platform for the most mundane, uninteresting
aspects of their lives
because they have to constantly be producing some kind of output of
communication.
Well, and if not producing it, certainly absorbing it, right?
Yeah, we're both.
I always feel like I'm mining when I'm on Twitter, like, nothing, nothing,
nothing, nothing.
Oh, rape.
Oh, murder.
Oh, look at this.
The monkey found.
Oh.
I mean, there's other people you could have on the show that could speak more
intelligently to this,
but I know that, I mean, I've heard that risk of suicide and Facebook are
correlated.
In other words, people that are on Facebook and social media, they are at an
increased risk of depression and thoughts of suicide.
And that's terrifying.
Do you think that that's correlation equals causation, though?
You know what I mean?
Like, do you think that people on Facebook all the time are doing that because
they're already depressed?
Well, right.
I mean, that's the question.
But the correlation means we have to look at something more closely.
Anxiety rates in teenagers have skyrocketed.
Anxiety partly comes from a sort of painful self-awareness, and, of course,
that's amplified by social media
because you can never escape the opinions of your peers.
I mean, that's crippling to people.
I mean, when I, you know, I wasn't the most popular kid in class by a long shot.
I mean, when I came home, whatever my issues were, were on hold until, you know,
when I was a kid in high school.
Those issues were on hold until 8 a.m. the next morning, right?
You got a 12-hour break from your problems, and now you don't, and it's really
tough on kids.
Yeah.
I could only imagine growing up today.
You know, I think we got very lucky that we experienced the Internet in
adulthood.
You know, for me, I was, I think I was 27 the first time I ever got online, and
that's nice, you know?
And no one knew what online was back then.
You weren't leaving any traces.
You were just going out and looking at stuff.
Yeah.
You know, it wasn't.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, I was, how old was I?
I was about 36.
I remember a girl asked me, she said, you ever logged on?
And I was like, logged on?
Logged on to what?
She had to explain to me what that meant.
And then I literally said to her, oh, that's never going to catch on.
Come on.
That's like, yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
Isn't that what they said about the first computers?
Like, that was one of IBM's initial reactions to the idea of the personal
computer.
I think that's the reaction to the first of everything, except maybe the bow
and arrow.
I mean, like, when they invented the bow and arrow, everyone was like, no, that
is going
to catch on.
That is cool, right?
But everything else, I think that's, you know, the skepticism.
Like, we don't need anything more.
We're good.
And then you realize, I mean, that's the amazing thing about the human mind, is
that we invent
this stuff.
Yeah.
And it doesn't mean that it's good.
I mean, we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to live in a very
different environment
than we live now.
So these things that we invent, it doesn't mean that they're sort of
psychologically good
for us, but they definitely are incredible.
I mean, they're definitely amazing things.
Yeah, I don't think that necessarily they're good for us, but I don't think,
this is kind
of sound weird, but I don't even think they're necessarily designed for us.
I think they're designed for the future.
I think, and I don't even think it's a design.
I just think that all things move in an ever more complex direction, and that
whatever a
person is now is not going to be the same thing a thousand years from now, or a
hundred
years from now, even.
I think there's going to be some sort of symbiotic connection between us and
electronics.
We're going to have it installed in our bodies.
Well, you know, that gets to a kind of profound question, like what is the
point of existence,
of human existence?
What's the point of it?
Is the point for as many humans as possible to lead safe, human-fulfilled lives,
or is
it for the human race as an entity to produce the highest technological
achievements and scientific
insights?
You know, and I don't have a vote either way, but that does sort of seem to be
the question.
And that technology, I mean, we know does not lead to fulfillment and happiness,
but it
does lead to scientific insight and to, you know, incredible, I mean, a
profound understanding
of how the universe works in a physical sense.
I wonder if what we're doing is just being caught up in the momentum of all
this innovation and
instead of like using discipline or using some sort of a rational, objective
analysis of like
what it takes to be happy.
And then maybe pushing, pushing some of that stuff aside and engaging in
actually physical
activities, going out and doing things and, and making that almost like a
prescription.
Like, Hey, you know, look, let's look at your daily chart.
Hey, you don't, you didn't get enough vitamins, buddy.
And Hey, you didn't get enough activity.
Like you need, you need that in order to be, in order to feel right, to feel,
feel balanced.
Right.
And if feeling right is the point of existence, then iPhones are probably not a
good development.
Right.
If the exchange of data, if the exchange of information is the point, then,
then they're
a great innovation.
So it really depends on what we're all here for.
I, I was in San Francisco with my wife and we were walking behind these two
kids who were
talking about, about robots.
And one was saying, they were sort of geek kids that were sort of, sort of in
the know
about all this stuff.
And one, one guy was saying, you know, they're taking over, you know, in 50
years, you know,
we're, we're, we're going to be, humans are going to be completely unnecessary.
And I said to my wife, you know, we always were unnecessary.
Like none of this had to happen.
It's not like the world needs human beings to exist.
And for some purpose, right?
We just, we are here, but we didn't have to be here.
And so if robots replace us, we go right back to where we would have been if we
hadn't, if
we hadn't evolved.
Yeah.
And it was, it was just a funny way of thinking about it.
Like none of this is actually necessary.
It doesn't have to be happening.
No, it certainly doesn't.
I mean, look, if we are finite life forms, if you're only going to be lived to
be, you
know, if you're lucky 90 years and when your health's going to fail 